QuoteReplyTopic: Did the nazis believe their own theories? Posted: 07-Jun-2009 at 19:03

Hello, I was studying the idea of an Aryan race, which is known from the nazism.Hitler must have believed the idea of a supreme race which was connected to the german people, but what about the other leading members of the nazi-party?

In 1935 Himmler made the "Ahnenerbe" a team of scientist who's assignment was to discover the story of the Aryan race and find its connection to the german people. We've seen it all, field trips to Tibet looking for traces of this Aryan race.But do you think that the nazi leaders, aswell as the members of the nazi-party, believed all of this, or did they just use it as a way to power?

Yes. But as mentioned I was more interested in the nazi-leaders/members, because this idea was one of the most important in nazism. So the question is did the nazis use it as manipulation, or did they really believe it?

Well who are 'they'? The leaders or Hitler himself? I'd imagine the Nazi's attracted many opportunists who saw the benefits of being the 'in' crowd in a totalitarian regime. They perhaps were manipulative (I don't know enough about the Nazi leadership to comment on who may have fallen into that category) Hitler and those closest to him certainly did not believe it for manipulative purposes. Maybe Goebbels... Who knows.

Sorry, in general the nazi-party.I think you are right. Hitler and Himmler definitely believed the idea of the Aryan race.My assignment is to study the nazi mentality and I would say it is a crucial subject. Indeed if they don't believe their own ideas.

There is an abundance of literature on this subject... hard to say what has happened in the minds of the party... I am sure that most people in the party didn't believe them - and some opportunists "believed" for the sake of believing, to further their own gains, such things that humans are fond of throughout history. That at least is a summary of some viewpoints that may have been shared by the individuals that were in and around the party.

Most people in both the party and the country as a whole did believe it. 19th and 20th century nationalism was firmly entrenched within Europe at the time, and to come up with a theory that supported this based on "scientific" evidence was exactly what people back then wanted to hear and believe. So not only could they love their country and justify it as a dominant and agressive power, they could also take courage in believing that the people which populated it were intrinsically superior to all others by virtue of a carefully propogated bloodline which had been protected from mingling with "inferior" races.

The Nazis were apt to look back on great empires of the past, praise their early days of glory and conquest, and then explain that such people inevitably fell due to their intermingling with inferior subject peoples. But they argued that they had themselves never been subject to such dilution of their racial purity.

It is not the challenges a people face which define who they are, but rather the way in which they respond to those challenges.

I think that most Nazis and German citizens at the time DID believe in it.

Actually, the Nazi theory of a superior "Aryan race" was nothing new at the time. throughout the 19th century the belief of distinct biological races was firmly entrenched in the minds of Europeans (it is even today among certain sectors of the population). Not only in Germany, but also in Britain, Sweden, Belgium, France...

The only difference between the Nazis and the racialist policies of the European colonial empires was their belief in "exterminating" the inferior races, instead of "subjugating them".

Ah, yes I can see the similarities to the colonial empires mentality.But in order to understand the difference in the racialist policy the Nazi's thought that Germany had been infected (the jews) and therefore extermination was a necessity?I'll try to link these two mentalities together in my assignment.Thanks for the reply Calvo, very usefull :)

Like any violent movements, the NAZI movement was a mix of motives and varying degrees of belief in the stated ideology.

Individual NAZIS, like individual; perscecutors of any sort, could probably be grouped into four broad categories. Substitute NAZI with Red Guard, Khmer Rouge, Hutu militant and the results are the same.

Aryan is just a sub-group of Indo-European, someone can be an Aryan who calls himself/herself Aryan too, for example from very ancient times we see Persians have always called themselves Aryan, Darius the Great says "I am a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineage" or Ardeshir I, the founder of Sassanid empire, says just Aryan, not even Persian:

Not really, they were quite different. The Swedish institution, created in the 1920s was based on American and English predecessors and the aim was originally to get rid of hereditary deceases, not to prove any Ã¼bermenschen theories. It did however attract some rather dubious individuals: Herman Lundborg was kicked out after people realized he had Nazi ideas and replaced by Dahlberg, who was openly hostile to the Nazis. However, they did some really nasty things, like sterlisiation of mentally retarded (which was relatively popular in several "civilized" nations in the West ), but it wasn't Nazism. The aryan superiority nonsense started appearing in the end of the 19th century in England and Germany and is a different matter.

The word "race" has so bad connotations nowadays it gives you a slightly wrong perception. I might add that the name of the institution was changed to "Genetical Research Institution" or somesuch in the 50s and continued to work. Genetical research is actually quite similar to what those guys were trying to do, albeit with modern technology and different name.

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